Black ink tattoo of a skeleton entwined with a bare tree, running down the side of the ribs, with small red accents on the branches.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton and bare tree on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A skeleton figure stands upright along the centre of the design, with its arms reaching into a network of bare, spindly branches that spread up and across the torso. Roots spread out at the base near the hip, and small figures and red dots appear among the branches. The linework is bold and dark with solid black areas and fine branch detail, and the photograph shows the tattoo on the side of the torso against a plain background.

Blackwork Ribs Skeleton Tree Branches Root Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marit had walked the edge of Hallow Wood every February since her grandmother's hands stopped being able to hold the axe. Each year the bone-tree stood a little further from the birches around it, as if it were slowly leaving the village. Its branches were black and bare as wire against the grey sky, and the red drops hanging from them had not thinned in forty years. Her grandmother said they were the last breaths of the people the tree had taken. Marit had counted twenty-three on the walk over, one for each name on the chapel board.

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The bone-man stood at the heart of it with his ribs open to the frost and his arms lifted into the branches, as though he had been caught climbing and forgotten how to come down. Roots gripped the peat beneath his heel and pulled away into the dark. Marit set her basket on a stump and spoke the first name, Tom Aske, who had gone under the mill race when she was six. A drop swelled, trembled, and fell into the moss without a sound.

She said the next name, and the next, her breath going white in the cold. Each name loosened a drop and each drop fell. Then she came to her father's name, her voice caught, and she stood there with the frost biting her cheeks and found she could not make the sound come. The branch above her held its last bead and seemed to lean closer.

Marit said her own name, the one nobody in the village used any more, and felt it leave her like water from a cut branch. The last red drop let go. The bone-man's arms came slowly down to his sides, and where the bark had been bare, a single green bud opened at the tip of a twig, as if spring had only been waiting for someone to ask.